Floating
Through The Final Curtain

On a coach holiday to Eastbourne
the driver took us on an optional trip out and we stopped for about twenty
minutes at Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff
(163m / 531 ft) and famous suicide spot. We alighted
from the coach into bright sunlight. With fortuitous timing as the driver was
telling us someone from the chaplain service drove along the road about ever
twenty minutes looking for jumpers, the chaplain drove passed.

On average there
are 20 jumpers each year. I remember reading a small column-filler in the
newspaper where a young woman had jumped to her death from Beachy
Head and on her body was found a terse note: “Life is simply not for me.”

I saw a few
telephones with the Samaritans number on it. Also the coach driver said workers
at the pub and taxi drivers are also on the look-out for possible jumpers.
Across the globe these cliffs are the third place for people killing themselves
by throwing themselves over an edge: number one is the Golden Gate Bridge in
San Francisco and, number two, the Aokigahara Woods
in Japan.

Looking over the
edge was sickeningly exciting. I could remember those frightening chalky cliffs
in a couple of films: Quadrophenia where a man goes
over the top on a scooter and The Living Daylights when James Bond does the
same in a Land Rover - only to parachute to safety.

I’ve met two
people who have committed suicide successfully - but not by jumping over Beachy Head. One was the local barber, a colourful
character. One weekend morning one of my mum’s friends rang to say police had
cordoned off a nearby road as some kids had found a body. It worked out that
the barber who’d cut my hair regularly and recently. He was a slight wimpy gay
likeable lad and I heard on the grapevine he’d be selling drugs through his
shop on the precinct. He wanted to stop but the supplier knew he was a soft as
mud and forced him to continue. The pressure heightened, he cracked and hung
himself from a post.

Two people have told
me privately they’d tried to end their lives, both being desperately lonely and
being unable to see worthwhile ahead. Both were women, both used pills however
four out of five people who attempt suicide are men (usually 35 to 50.) The worst
case I’ve heard of recently is a man who threw himself onto electric circular
saws in his shed.

Once I had a
flat to rent out and a mother asked if she could bring her daughter round for a
viewing. The daughter had two broken legs and she just about managed to mount
the steep steps on crutches. A slug could have beaten her to the door of the
flat. She’d been in a psychiatric section of the hospital and tried to jump out
of a high window to kill herself. Life was not broken but two legs were.
Thankfully she didn’t like the deep Victorian bath and didn’t rent the place.

When people hear
of someone who’s committed suicide and make remarks
like, “They wouldn’t kill themselves – never in a thousand years,” or “I knew
them inside it; it isn’t in their nature,” I’m surprised. Who really knows the
interior life of another person? Who knows what flights of joy and numbing
misery flex and fluctuate in that grey stuff inches behind our eyes? How can we
ever know what unedited thoughts flow through the windowless back rooms of our
minds where were live alone with ourselves?

I’m fairly sure
thoughts of not wanting to live are more common than anyone knows. I never
understand it though. Are not music and books and art a reason to live? I also
think how lucky I am to be here. Millions of my dad’s sperm died but one made
it to one of about 480 eggs my mum released in her lifetime. I owe it to that
tadpole and that egg to live on.

I think of
suicide in a practical way. Between 2050 and 2060 I expect to be somewhere
towards the end. As I’ll be single and I baulk at the thought of medical people
invading my privacy I can foresee a trip to Dignitas
in Switzerland to drink a glass of lethal milkshake.

So here is a sad
painting on a small canvas. The woman has just walked into the room to find
someone slumped on the couch, slipping into the abyss. I’m not sure about the
picture on the wall but it looks like an object has been thrown at it.